Publikasjoner
Transnational organizing: Issue professionals in environmental sustainability networks
An ongoing question for institutional theory is how organizing occurs transnationally, where institution building occurs in a highly ambiguous environment. This article suggests that at the core of transnational organizing is competition and coordination within professional and organizational networks over who controls issues. Transnational issues are commonly organized through professional battles over how issues are treated and what tasks are involved. These professional struggles are often more important than what organization has a formal mandate over an issue. We highlight how ‘issue professionals’ operate in two-level professional and organizational networks to control issues. This two-level network provides the context for action in which professionals do their institutional work. The two-level network carries information about professional incentives and also norms about how issues should be treated and governed by organizations. Using network and career sequences methods, we provide a case of transnational organizing through professionals who attempt issue control and network management on transnational environmental sustainability certification. The article questions how transnational organizing happens, and how we can best identify attempts at issue control.
How activists use benchmarks: Reformist and revolutionary benchmarks for global economic justice
Private Force and the Making of States, c. 1100-1500
This chapter shows how the distinction between the public and the private emerges with respect to the use of force in conjunction with the long rise of the state in Europe. In drawing a historical conceptual analysis of the changing organization of military power in the making of states, I show why we need to take an empirical rather than an ideological approach to the distinction between different types of force, as only then can we hope to understand why and for what purposed power was organized in specific ways, and the consequences of that organization. The chapter takes as its starting point the late eleventh century, a period when public authorities had been decimated throughout Christendom and where kings no longer held the aura of public authority, but were (private) contestants for public authority on equal footing with their competitors. Both public and private force was private, so to speak. I proceed in five sections. The first addresses the relationship between war-making and state-making, a relationship which is central to much of the literature on state formation and to our further discussion. The next three sections address the chronology of changes in the organization of force, and move from warfare as a knightly (largely) private enterprise to the wars of mercenaries, culminating in the early attempts at holding standing permanent armies around the late fifteenth century. The claim is not that this process was linear or inevitable, and, as demonstrated in the last section, the centralization of the legitimate means of warfare in the hands of public authorities did not mean the end of private enterprise in a world of states. Rather, private enterprise continued alongside public force, albeit in a different character.
Norway, the Joint Strike Fighter Program and its Implications for Transatlantic Defense Industrial Cooperation
Viewpoint paper. Islander mobilities: any change from climate change?
Private force and the emergence of the international system
This chapter deals with the importance of private force to the early emergence and spread of the international system. It discusses how varieties of non-traditional forms of force helped maintain what was in many ways an international system of empires. The chapter focuses on the rules, norms and values of the system and shows how the gradual abolishment of private force has helped foster ideational cohesion in the international system. It also focuses on modes of interaction, and on how an unintended consequence of the use of private force has been a functionalist push for a tighter integrated system. The chapter also deals with mercenarism, privateering and piracy, the most important forms of private force for the emergence of the international system. It concludes that private force should be understood as one of the central productive forces in the gradual emergence of the modern international system.